This series of posts explore strategies for building an ethical organization. One of these strategies is to hire the right people.

It’s important to remember that there’s a limit to how much an organization can influence the ethical conduct of its employees. If an employee is not ethical when hired, they are unlikely to become ethical because of something that happens at work. There are different theories about the age at which a person’s ethics is set, although it is clear ethics is set in early adulthood at the latest. The idea that you can begin ethics training with employees at all stages of their careers and somehow make them turn out to be ethical is wishful thinking.

Instead, you need to hire people who are likely to be ethical. One approach is to encourage employees to self-select whether they will fit the ethics of the organization. One high-tech organization shows prospective employees a video on the organization’s ethics before it allows them to complete an employment application. They have found that some employees don’t bother to apply as a result. Interestingly, the company also attracted more of the employees it otherwise sought.

An organization can tailor any of several widely used survey and screening instruments that have some validity. While the ability of a survey instrument to pick out the most ethical employees is limited, employees who are ethically clueless are likely to stand out.

Often, just letting your recruiters know that ethics is an important consideration in your organization’s hiring process will produce results. Tell them that fit with organization’s culture will be important factor in finding the right candidate and you may at least screen some unethical candidates out – for example those who lie or exaggerate on their resumes.

There are many ideas about the factors that contribute to the ethics of an organization. These ideas range from ethical leadership to a concern for stakeholders to having a mission beyond economic success. While these ideas seem plausible, there is little evidence to support them. More importantly, there is often little you can do to affect these factors. A company that makes coat hangers is limited in the extent to which it can make its mission inspiring.

So a team of researchers set out to isolate actionable factors that contribute to an organization’s ethics. Their research found three factors that any organization can use to improve its ethics.

The first factor is a work culture in which employees are never retaliated against for reporting concerns. Many studies show that organizations in which employees report errors do better on quality measures and our research supports this. Employees in all organizations fear retaliation to some extent, especially when reporting on their managers. This fear of speaking up allowed unethical practices to persist at GM and Volkswagen even when many employees knew better. Ethical organizations don’t pretend that fear of retaliation does not exist but instead work to create a culture in which retaliation is not tolerated and reporting is expected. More to follow.

Is there still a point to having in-person, flesh-and-blood meetings? Is there a point to such meetings when we can see and hear a person in another part of the country/world as if they were seated across from us? Is the belief that being there in-person still matters just a pre-technological bias that will pass as technology makes remote communication even more accessible? My work in ethics tells me that there is a point to in-person meetings – and we can put our finger on just what this point is. I explain this in the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-pastin/up-close-and-personal-why_b_9394572.html .

The first myth about compliance program assessment is that it is an optional part of an effective compliance program. The same sentence in the Sentencing Guidelines that mandates a hotline also mandates compliance program assessment. And, even if program assessment were not mandatory, it is would be incumbent on your organization to undertake assessment. Org […]

We are contacted by headhunters because we know a lot of compliance officers and we know whether they are available. However, it is extremely difficult to help these folks as they often have no idea what a compliance officer does. They are generally working from a job description written by someone in HR who also has little idea what a compliance officer doe […]

While there will continue to be new posts on longer topics on ethicswhisperer.com, I also encourage you to follow markpastin.com, which is updated more frequently and focuses on issues of the day. Of course, your comments are always welcome on any of our sites.

Hear yea! Hear yea! Hear yea! The next hot word in compliance will be UPQUALING. This, of course, is on the model of UPCODING. Healthcare reform is a gamble on the idea that incentives can be given to lower the cost of care while maintaining or improving its quality. This has been tried before with limited success under the rubrics "managed care," […]

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